The Priest's Madonna (3 page)

There were exceptions; not everyone was so unkind. The grocer welcomed me when I stopped in for flour. The mayor came—in time for our midday dinner—to introduce himself. And Mme Gautier, the butcher’s wife, brought us a lamb pie. But she did not stay long and spoke in a whisper, even when we’d closed the door behind her, as if she was afraid of being overheard. How I longed for our first Sunday! I had the idea that the village would transform itself for Mass—that somehow the shared ritual of communion, of kneeling together to pray, would initiate us into the community, and that we would finally be welcomed as neighbors.

Mother, Claude, Michelle, and I walked the short distance uphill to the church that first Sunday. (Father only accompanied us on Easter or Christmas, when Mother insisted.) I noticed again, as I had already on several occasions, how the dome appeared lop-sided, as if it had been gradually sliding earthward since the eleventh century, when, we’d been told, it had been built. Moss grew between the limestone bricks, and pigeons nested beneath the porch roof. The interior was in even greater disrepair: the walls were of varying thickness and almost seemed to ripple. Most of the windows had been blown out by a storm some years back, and the wind whistled through the nave. The main altar was nothing more than a stone slab supported by two stone pillars. On the slab stood a wooden tabernacle from which the gilt had begun to peel. A secondary altar set against the wall consisted of another stone pillar, this one cracked down the length of one side, topped with a statue of the Holy Virgin and decorated with a plaque that bore the devotion of the Miraculous Medal: “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” The only object of beauty in the church was set in a niche behind the main altar: a gilded Christ figure, haloed and robed in blue, two fingers extended in blessing.

The nave was tiny, with seats for maybe seventy people. Most of the congregants were women and children. As at the fountain, talk ceased when we entered, and heads turned. The first pew had been left empty, and I guessed this was a test to see if we would have the audacity to sit there. My mother wisely chose the last pew instead, and we slipped in beside her and knelt, bowing our heads. I sensed that even our prayer—customary before the service in our home church at Espéraza—was interpreted as an unctuous rebuke, for it was not the custom at Rennes-le-Château. I felt as if I’d swallowed a stone.

The priest at that time was a man who seemed as old as the church itself. He doddered up the aisle, swinging the censer, his hands shaking so that I feared he might drop it. His sermon was impossible to follow. He spoke so slowly that by the time he reached the end of a sentence, I’d forgotten where he’d begun. People slept or chatted. He didn’t seem to notice—he carried on as if we weren’t there, as if the Mass was solely a personal communication between him and God.

When he died later that year, his requiem was a somber festival. Soon afterward, hopeful rumors spread through the village about the young priest who was to be appointed in his place. He was coming from Clat, we heard, where he’d served for three years. My mother showed some interest in this news—she must have known Bérenger’s whereabouts at the time and guessed it was he.

T
HE DAY HE arrived was warm and clear. I was outside sweeping the front stoop when I saw him coming up the path. The hem of his cassock was white with dust, and sweat had darkened the cloth below his arms. He carried a small yellow valise, dusty as well. Heads peeked around half-open shutters. He smiled at a few faces, but received barely a nod in return.

As he approached our house, his face brightened and he greeted me by name, which surprised me. I did not recognize him—it had been eight years since we’d met—but, wanting to appear more welcoming than my neighbors, I bowed my head and returned his greeting. He set down his valise and, placing his hands at his waist, stretched backward, causing his back to pop like pine in a fire.

“You don’t remember me,” he said, smiling devilishly. Having the upper hand in this way seemed to amuse him, but as he spoke, I
did
remember him: he wore the same expression of roguish delight when he hoisted me on his back at the grotto.

“Yes, I do remember you. We met at Sainte Baume.”

“A-ha! And you’re all grown up now. A young woman.”

My mother appeared at the door and exclaimed, “It
is
you!” before rushing to greet Bérenger with a kiss on each cheek. “I knew you had been at Clat,” she continued. “What a coincidence!”

“A lucky one,” he said.

“How is your dear mother?”

They exchanged pleasantries—Bérenger asked after Father and Claude and expressed his regret at the change in our circumstances. “Mother told me of the fire,” he said, shaking his head. “Such a loss.”

“It can’t be helped,” my mother said, dismissing the subject, which was her way with unpleasant topics. Michelle emerged, her hands still black with soil from the garden, and curtsied as Mother introduced her. “I’ll be glad to show you the presbytery,” Mother said, “though I’m afraid you will find it disappointing. It hasn’t been lived in since God knows when. The last priest stayed with his sister in Rennes-les-Bains.” She instructed us to set another place for our midday dinner, and then escorted Bérenger up the hill.

Michelle and I prepared the
estofinado
and the tomato salad, chatting excitedly all the while about Bérenger. The fact that Mother knew his family gave us a feeling of privilege. And though we would never say it out loud, we were thrilled by his looks—the dark, commanding brows, the thick black hair, the mischievous grin, and the athletic build that was not entirely hidden by his cassock. When my mother returned with Bérenger, Michelle served him dinner, demurely spooning the cod onto his plate and giving him an ample amount of sauce and potatoes. I poured the wine.

While we ate, Mother continued to inquire after Bérenger’s family. His father, it appeared, had been mayor of Montazels at one time and now served as the steward of the old castle. His brother David was a Jesuit who taught school in Narbonne. He had several other siblings, one or two of whom had children. When Mother asked again after his mother, he sighed heavily, but said only that she was “the same as ever.” Mother nodded sympathetically, then changed the topic.

“You’ll stay with us, I hope,” she said. “Until we can get the presbytery into a livable state again.”

Bérenger raised his eyebrows and looked at me, which made me blush. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But I couldn’t impose.”

“Nonsense,” said my mother, and she brooked no further protests.

So Bérenger became our boarder. He slept on the floor by the hearth, his feet to the fire, his head beneath the table, and until my father found him a cot, he smelled of food: garlic, sheep’s blood, goat cheese. The primitive accommodations embarrassed me, but Bérenger seemed not to mind. He was always cheerful, despite his habit of rising early and staying up well past midnight reading scripture. He ate with us at dawn, and when Father and Claude left for the factory, he went to church to conduct morning Mass. After Mass, he worked in his office: a table and chair in a cleared corner of the presbytery kitchen. There he updated the parish accounts, which the previous priest had neglected. When he did not have church affairs to tend to or his own devotions to practice, he busied himself with making small repairs and constructing serviceable furniture for his own use (I know this because Michelle and I made it our habit to stop by the presbytery often, under some pretense or another). My mother, who had offered her services as his housekeeper at a modest rate, tackled the formidable job of cleaning up the presbytery and maintaining the church. This doubled her work, of course, so Michelle and I took on more responsibility at home.

But together we were efficient, and managed to finish our chores by early afternoon most days. It was my mother’s belief that if we were well educated, we might have a better chance of marrying genteel husbands, and, in Espéraza, we’d had a small library of books that we’d taken great pleasure in, reading aloud to each other from Balzac and Hugo as well as the
Lives of the Saints
(which Mother insisted we read daily). But we had managed to salvage only a few volumes from the fire—a history of the French Revolution, the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, one or two Balzacs—so in Rennes our studies slowed. Rather than bore ourselves with the same old stories, we would stray to the open pastures where the hill began to slope toward the valley. From there we could see the red rooftops of Espéraza and the towers of the new factories, puffing smoke from their mouths like fat industrial dragons. We would chew on sprigs of wild rosemary and thyme and look out over the
garrigues,
talking of Bérenger and what we imagined he thought of his new home.

Miryam rose at dawn from a restless sleep. The house was quiet, her sisters and parents still asleep. She pulled on her cloak, wound a sash at her waist, tucked a leather purse beneath it, and left the house, sandals in hand. Outside, she slipped them on and walked to the shore to watch the fishermen haul in their nightly catch. Torches bobbed on the lake, marking the location of boats that were still out. As they approached, the men extinguished their lights and prepared to unload their seines full of small silver
musht,
some still quivering with life.

Miryam had lately heard tales of a teacher traveling through the Galil, healing the sick. Great throngs of people had gathered near Kfar Nahum to hear him speak and watch him perform his miracles. It was rumored that he and his followers had now camped just outside of Magdala, and that they would be passing by the city that very day. This was why she slipped early from her bed: she intended to seek out this itinerant prophet.

“These are the stages of the people of Yisrael, when they went forth out of the land of Egypt,” she whispered as she watched the fishermen spread their nets on the shore to dry. A few began to build a fire several feet from the shore, close to where she stood. Some of them looked in her direction, then looked away. They knew she was well beyond the customary age of betrothal and yet unmarried, a woman incoherent in her speech, wild in her actions, possessed, it was said, by seven devils.

A wind blew off the lake, chilling her. But though the sun had not yet warmed the air, the men were stripped to the waist. Sweat dripped from their hairlines and snaked down their backs as they squatted by the flames, cleaning some of the fish with bright blades. They ate the roasted
musht
for breakfast, picking the thin bones from their tongues.

A
T THE TIME of Bérenger’s arrival, I knew little about the political tenor of the country. My father had taught me simply that the republicans stood for the common person, the true Frenchman, while the monarchists wanted to maintain the rule of the wealthy elite. Times were changing, according to him, and it was the republicans who would usher in modernity.

But Bérenger, I learned, was as passionate as my father about politics—and he was a monarchist. He arrived in Rennes just as Jules Ferry and the fledgling republic were excising the tumor of religion from society. Divorce was legalized; Sunday was no longer an obligatory day of rest. Public education was declared free, mandatory, and lay-taught, causing Bérenger’s brother David to lose his teaching post. Bérenger deeply resented the republic’s antireligious militancy.

These changes barely affected my family, though my father and mother argued when divorce was legalized. Mother did not have political views, on the whole, but she supported the Church in all things. Religion, in my father’s mind, was a tower of lies constructed to contain and dominate the populace. Normally, my parents avoided the subject, but the divorce ruling set my mother’s blood boiling. The day she heard of it, she raged at my father from the moment he set foot in the door, as if he had cast the deciding vote. She took it personally: if his Republic had legalized divorce, then he must support the notion, and therefore must be planning to divorce her. She wouldn’t allow it, she told him. “Let no man put asunder!” she shouted, clanging the ladle against the soup tureen until M. Paul, who lived next door, knocked to see if all was well.

Imagine, then, my father’s unease at Bérenger’s presence in our house. Under our own roof, a cleric
and
a monarchist! The first night Bérenger arrived, Father eyed him suspiciously over our meal. When we had cleared our places and they were sharing a smoke, he broached the topic. “We’ve an election coming. Three months.”

Michelle and I were sitting by the door, trying to make use of the last light leaving the summer sky. She was sewing the eyes on one of her dolls—she was quite good at making dolls from scraps of fabric, pretty pebbles, pinecones, and dried berries, anything she could find. I was knitting, but I laid my work in my lap when I heard my father’s comment.

“Indeed,” Bérenger said.

“Will you vote?”

“I always vote.”

“Mm-hmmm,” said my father. Then, impatiently, “For whom?”

Claude was bouncing a ball in the dust outside; I motioned to him to stop. Bérenger shifted in his chair. “I know your position, monsieur,” Bérenger began, “and I respect it. I am, however, of a different mind. The Republic has done innumerable injuries to the Church, and to society, in my opinion. I can’t, in good conscience, vote to support such a government. As a priest.”

“Ha! How about all the injury the Church has done to the Republic? To France, better yet! Where should we begin?”

“Maybe we’d better not.”

“Is your cause that insupportable? Not even worth an argument?” A silence. “Your Church—” my father prompted, in a threatening tone.

“Mine, too, Edouard,” interrupted my mother. “Your children’s, too. Don’t forget.”

“Hush,” snapped my father. “Your Church,” he began again, but faltered. He was bursting to release the floodgates of his political opinion—how the Church peddled lies in exchange for money and power—but he knew how proud my mother was to have Bérenger in our home, and how much Michelle and I admired Bérenger. If he embarked on one of his diatribes, he might succeed in out-arguing Bérenger, but he would lose our esteem. “Let’s just say,” he said, after a long moment, “that we have our quarrels.”